For what are the coalition, if not a stagily squabbling set of proven losers who – let's face it – don't have a whole heap of options other than muddling along together?
A little while later, the congressional leadership came to the White House for a meeting, emerged onto the driveway, and rather stagily announced that they had asked Bush to speak to a joint session of Congress the following evening, and that he had agreed.
Mr. Hunter solves the problem somewhat stagily by having Charlie receive friends and family over several days, during which he seeks to solve a mystery in his past, mend some battered fences and prepare for the imminent death that a diagnosis of congestive heart failure has more or less ordained.
And Lieutenant Compton, with his starchy sense of decorum and his sincere desire to do some good, represents an advance over the old colonial order, whose last vestige is an imperious, nasty priest played, rather too stagily, by Yul Vázquez.
Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, "The Destruction of the Father," for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms.
There were far too many Kimmel-centric skits breaking up the evening, including a tedious one in which he blamed his parents for his disappointment over not winning an Emmy, and had them stagily ejected from the room.
Reality shows like "Real Housewives" — be they of Orange County, Atlanta, New York or New Jersey — "The Bachelor," "Jersey Shore" (and a hair salon knockoff, "Jerseylicious," on Style beginning this weekend) keep growing more stagily preposterous and rococo.
The solo singing in the first act - Robert Gambill's Oedipus, Jan Hendrik Rootering's Creon, Juha Uusitalo's Tiresias - had been efficient and precise rather than involved, and Steven Berkoff's narration was stagily contrived, though that was more the fault of the rather faded dramatic device than the actor.
I suspect the piece – deftly directed by Christopher Haydon and stagily designed by Lily Arnold – is about the ability of the artist to adopt infinite disguises.
If Cowell is at all preoccupied with his legacy – and his stagily foregrounded vanity suggests that is a vague possibility – then he might reflect that he has somehow created a cultural environment in which even his unborn child will be viewed as less of a reproductive accident and more of an inscrutable, Talleyrand-style calculation.
The humiliation of failing to secure pay-per-view rights to the event must have hit the old guy hard, and though he tried to chuck in the odd zinger - "I wish they'd leave me alone", he lamented stagily of a succession of fawning British prime ministers - it was clear that enhancing the viewer experience out of the goodness of his heart was anathema to him.
